Thursday, August 07, 2014

IELTS Writing Task 1: real statistics

A good place to find 'real' descriptions of graphs and charts is a government statistics website like this one for the UK. If you click on the different themes, you'll see graphs, charts and written summaries of recent statistics for the country.

Here's an example summary from the website:

The employment rate for those aged from 16 to 64 for the three months to June 2012 was 71.0 per cent. This is the highest figure since the three months to May 2009 and it is up 0.4 percentage points on the previous quarter. The number of people in employment aged 16 and over increased by 201,000 on the quarter to reach 29.48 million, the largest quarterly increase since the three months to July 2010. The number of people in employment was 96,000 lower than the pre-recession peak of 29.57 million recorded for March-May 2008.

Note:I've underlined the verbs in the paragraph above. Notice that we tend to use 'easy' verbs when describing statistics.

Comments

I will attend the British Council’s reoffered IELTS exam because of the power cut on the 19th of July exam. It is a so rare situation. In the middle of the reading exam lights killed suddenly and it took more than 1 hour. And then, they decided to postpone the exam. Lucky, I took speaking exam and It was good. And I will take the rest of the exam 16th of August (8 days remain). I have been working hard until now. I need 6.5 in overall and at least 6 in each component. What is your advice for the rest? I mean, for remained week which strategy should I follow? Please don’t beware your help.

My name is North. I have followed your site just for a few days since I am going to take an ielts test next week. So,I've tried to write one of those writing tasks as a sample. The point is that I would like to know that my writing is quite acceptable or not. I am wondering that you could evaluate and correct my work.

I am looking forward to your reply.

Thank you very much

Ps. any other user can comment on my work. I really want to know if I've made any mistakes or not.

The table illustrates the changing trend of the different ways of transport by which the English travelled from 1985 to 2000.
Basically, over this period people in England travelled more, with the average distance travelled per person rising from 4740 miles to 6475 miles between 1985 and 2000.Concurring with the fact that people travelled longer distance, the use of cars, long distance buses, trains, taxis and other forms of transport which are not named in the table increased significantly. By contrast, Englishmen walked and travelled by bicycle and local bus much less.
Of all these modes of travel, cars seemed to be the most popular, with the distance of about 3200 miles travelled by each Englishman in year 1985 having skyrocketed to around 4800 miles by 2000, a rise of more than 1500 miles over a course of 15 years.
With only 13 miles travelled by each person in 1985, taxis were regarded as the least frequent transport utilized by English people. However, in 2000, with an increase in distance to over 40 miles, 4 times as much as it used to be in 1985, the use of taxis overtook that of bicycles, the distance travelled by which had dwindled away from 51 miles to 41 miles.

Hi Simon,
thanks a million for your website, its really been of great help. pls i have a pressing question of which i would like you to verify for me as i'm taking ielts this Saturday(16 August). My question is that do I have to leave a blank line between paragraphs or how do I leave a paragraph. Thanks

I feel lucky when I know your website ,I hope I will get my expected band by following your valuable advice and learning your way of writing, I will take the ielts in about 10 months,hope that is enough for me to prepare.Thank you very much.